All Points West - Music Festival Review (7/31/09-8/2/09)

All Points West is a three-day music festival at Liberty State Park in New Jersey, right across the river from New York City. The venue was beautiful and the line-up fantastic, but the weather did not cooperate—turning the venue into a rain-soaked mud pit for most of the weekend. The population was an interesting mix of hipsters, hippies, and confused citizens. One of the best sightings was a girl in stilettos trying to wade through about 3 feet of stanky mud.

There is a major difference to be noted between the kind of music festival where you camp out and live there, and the kind where everybody goes home at the end of the day. All Points West really illustrates this disparity. At a festival like Bonnaroo or Rothbury, there is a sense of community that comes out of actually creating a temporary home, centered around the things that the temporary citizens hold most dear: music, freedom, and good times.


APW had two out of the three, music and good times were definitely there. Friday got its momentum going with a gorgeous Fleet Foxes set, enhanced by a gentle rainfall that seemed almost perfectly synched with Robin Pecknold’s haunting falsetto rising like smoke from the stage. And then it poured. Later in the day, Karen O made me forget that I was soaking wet and freezing, wearing a tank top in the middle of a 50 degree rainstorm when the Yeah Yeah Yeahs took the stage. Jay-Z wrapped up the night in top form with an awesome “No Sleep Til Brooklyn” tribute to the Beastie Boys, for whom he was standing in due to MCA’s cancer scare.

The single greatest show of the weekend, in my humble opinion, was Sunday evening’s Ghostland Observatory. They played on the smallest of the three stages, a sparsely populated tent that harbored comedy acts by day and dance-heavy electronica by night. Their infamous light show was everything I’d heard about and more, and paired with the invigorating beats of Thomas Turner and hilarious stage antics of cross-dressing frontman Aaron Behrens, this show was definitely the most fun I had all weekend. Crystal Castles provided a similar counterpart for Saturday—Alice Glass is a maniac in the very best way.

Other notable winners were The Black Keys, who may be the single coolest straight-up rock band playing today, The Pharcyde, who proved that old-school hip-hop is the best hip-hop, and the back to back sets of St. Vincent and Neko Case, who beautifully illustrated the range of talented female indie musicians on the scene today.


And then there was MGMT, with their usual bullshit. Now don’t get me wrong, I love MGMT. But that’s the very thing—usually when I love a band that much, when songs make me feel that fucking great every time I hear them, I’m willing to cut some slack on their live performance flaws. But this is the second time I’ve seen them and felt like Andrew and Ben were taking a giant shit on my excited little face—at Bonnaroo the crowd was so amped up that I barely noticed the lack of energy onstage, but at APW the lackluster nature of the performance became painfully clear. In the audience, the jaded youth were out in full-force, pumped up and ready to be blown away, and while it’s quite possible that the band is trying to make some kind of statement on the very jaded-ness I speak of, honestly, MGMT, I’m not in the mood. Give me something I can feel. Apparently they were rushing off to see Coldplay which is why they ended their set early (a move that everyone and their mom knows is very uncool at a music festival). The song they played from their upcoming album “Celebration”was nothing to write home about, and they completely slaughtered “Kids”—it sounds better on my car speakers and one of them is busted. I don’t know if this is a calculated downfall or just the result of too many hit singles in too short a time, but something is awry.

I was far more impressed by Tool—while a lot of people wondered what they were doing at the festival at all, they are an example of a band that is truly passionate about its work, and it showed. The gorgeously mind-bending, stomach-turningly bizarre Alex Gray visuals on the screens were epic and the music was real and true and the fans were doing their thing in ways you’ve seen no fans do their thing before. It’s kind of inexplicable, and I wouldn’t believe me if I hadn’t witnessed it either, but there was just something about it, man.


Ultimately, despite the music and good times, there was a frustrating disconnect between what the festival seemed to stand for and the reality of the situation. There was the annoying multi-vehicle trek to get there each day, the Azkaban-worthy pat-down crew at the entrance gates, the cage-like beer tent where attempting to go in through the out door would bring the full wrath of Jersey bureaucracy down upon you… These things didn’t ruin the overall experience for me, but they kept it from reaching that Utopian state of wholeness that the best festivals seem to create. I enjoyed APW, but at $239.00 for a three-day pass, in addition to $15 a day for the ferry, I wouldn’t pay to go there again.

Review by Hilary Cadigan
Photos by Tracy Mayer & Hilary Cadigan